2014 Kia Cadenza — a new entrant in the near-luxury field.

Let’s start with a given about the Cadenza: Kia, the Korean car maker that sisters up with Hyundai, has made a fine near-luxury car that competes with such Japanese and German stars as Lexus, Infiniti, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. There are price differences, of course – the established marques cost more, but then again they have the vaunted reputations. There are no surprises here – the Cadenza is a four-door sedan, much like a lot of other four-door sedans.

What we wanted to get to first is a creeping trend in modern cars that is typified in the Cadenza: unequal treatment for the shotgun-seat passenger. It’s all about the myriad of power options that crowd the window sticker on cars these days. (You would be hard put to find a stripper version of almost any car, save some of the real cheapos.)

The Cadenza’s driver seat gets a fancy power adjustment that moves it up, down, forward, backward and tiltward. There’s also a lumbar support, a seatback recliner, a cushion extender and memory positions for two different drivers. (I’ll concede the memory bank – cars frequently have two different-size drivers.)

Just a few inches to the driver’s right, the passenger gets no such benefits. There’s a simple forward/backward switch and a seatback recliner. Huh? The passenger is chopped liver?

Further: on the center console is a bank of switches for seat temperature. The driver gets three levels of heated seat and three levels of ventilated seat. The passenger gets two levels of heat and that’s it. Huh, again.

What’s going on here? The simple answer could be that the manufacturer is cheaping it out, saving a few bucks here and there. But it’s not great public relations. Equal comfort for both front seat riders, say I.

Now that we’ve dispatched with the hot seat politics of the day, what about the car?

Kia has clearly cloned every luxo and near-luxo car out there and has come up with a satisfying boulevard traveler that will take four people in comfort on a day-long journey. This is not the proverbial rocket science. Cars these days are built to a fare-thee-well and are light years ahead of the junk we drove 40 and 50 years ago. I know, I know, there were some lovely cars back then. Many of them, however, did not stay glued together for 200,000 miles, something that is now pretty routine in well-maintained autos and trucks.

So the Cadenza has to be judged on what Kia has accomplished. True to their cloning gene, what they’ve made is a rebadged (but better looking) Hyundai Azera. Somehow, the Cadenza feels more substantial than the Azera, but I have no technological basis for saying that. It just feels that way. It may be the Cadenza’s more substantive looks.

The car is powered by a 3.3-liter V6 engine with 293 horsepower, driven through a six-speed automatic transmission, with the requisite paddle shifters for the Ricky Racers among us. Car and Driver magazine says it will do zero to 60 mph in 6.2 seconds and top out at 154 mph. That latter figure is pretty astounding, given that this is simply a sedan and has no cultural or legacy pretensions to high speed. No matter. Fuel mileage, Kia says, is on the order of 19/28 mpg, city/highway, neither here nor there.

On the road, the Cadenza is very tight and very quiet. The power steering is a bit numb – not much road feel – but that appears to be a sop to an American clientele that wants it that way.

The Cadenza starts life at $35,100, and then adds two optional $3,000 -packages: the technology group gives you, among other things, cruises control that keeps you from running into the car in front of you; blind spot monitoring and lane departure warning, as well as a curious item called “hydrophobic front door windows.” Windows that have a phobia of water? “A morbid dread of water,” is how the Merriam-Webster online dictionary describes hydrophobia. Aren’t we overdoing it a bit, Kia?

The other group, the luxury package, is a bit calmer and includes swiveling headlights, heated steering wheel (yes!), power rear sun shade and all those power seat variations we were whining about earlier.

In the end, the Cadenza is in an unenviable position: it’s competing in the class that includes Lexus ES350, BMW 5-series and Audi A6. Those cars are more expensive, but they are also known quantities. Closer to the Cadenza’s price – our tester was $41,900 – is its biggest competitor, the Toyota Avalon, whose optioned-up price hovers around that of the Cadenza or, depending on the options, costs less. And Toyota has the name and long-term reputation.

Nonetheless, if you have a sense of adventure, or a sense of wanting to have a different car, try the Cadenza. Yes, a $41,000 Kia is a bit much to swallow – they’re chiefly known in the U.S. for their econoboxes – but then again, you get something that may well be worth that.